Final thoughts

It has been a busy 3 months with modeling, texturing and animating. But now it's coming to the deadline with the project finished.

Due to the workload of other assignments and with my modeling abilities being at a basic level, the project was designed to be relatively simple to complete while still fulfilling the specifications and learning outcomes.

Remembering the process last year's project helped me to remember how to perform certain techniques such as texturing and using keyframes to animate the sword which saved time from trying to remember from scratch and to overcome problems that could occur (for example, the eyelids would behave incorrectly during the Summer scene unless I've added more keyframes). But in addition, new skills were acquired from attending lessons and looking up tutorials from the Internet (for example using the aim and constrain method to move the eyeballs) which greatly assisted the project to become more advanced. Not all tutorials were helpful though (such as animating the eyelid) which was disappointing but I've made sure that I didn't dwell on the failures too much and just continued the project using alternative methods.

While the sword model and animation are basic, they do their jobs well. The sword's simplicity helped convey its emotions such as anger and sadness so the audience can sympathize with it easily. The environments helps convince that time has passed and support the sword's emotions. Overall, I am pleased with how the project turned out in terms of the process and the final result which were done with little problems.

Fun with Lattice

Even though my animation's finished, I still had time to look at a new tool: Lattice. What this does is that it creates a box around your model which you can use to animate in all kinds of simple yet fun and strange ways.

I've decided to try this out for my sword (saving as a separate file in case it all went horribly wrong). The result is pretty unusual. It does allow more character for the sword at a cost of losing its realism since most swords are rigid in order to be usable in battle so I probably won't replace this version with the previous one.

Still, it was an interesting fun tool to try out (might have helped me with the assignment if I've discovered it earlier) so I've decided to save the footage of what I've done and post it here for all to enjoy.




In addition, I've edited this post making all the images darker so they're easier to see.

Big update

Hope you all had a happy holidays.

Quite a bit happened regarding the assignment since my last post.

For starts, I've added a sky background to hopefully convince that this is a mountain area. I've took a picture from my brother's room (my bedroom faces the woods so the trees would get in the way of the photo)



With this, the scene was ready to render. Rendering all 480 frames (16 seconds) took some time but not too long. I understand that the longer the animation and the more complex the scenes are, the longer it takes to render. However putting all individual frames into a video editing software (I've used Vegas Movie Studio) took longer; in fact it took me all afternoon yesterday to finish it. It was worth it though as this meant I could put in sound effects to add atmosphere to my scene. I've found a forest and snow sound effect from this site for free:

http://soundbible.com/

While the fire and rain sound effects were downloaded from this site which I've used for last year's assignment as well (which is also for free).

http://www.pacdv.com/sounds/index.html

You can see the final results here: